Our Selective Moral Outrage

Adele Balasingham with the LTTE somewhere in the 1990s

There’s a Facebook post doing the usual rounds calling for the United Kingdom to try/extradite/spank Adele Balasingham, the widow of former Tiger theoretician Anton Balasingham. At various times, Mrs Balasingham was recorded handing out cyanide necklaces to Tiger child fighters, and otherwise encouraging them to be little terrorists. The individual preambles and comments that this post is accompanied by claim that the London and Manchester attacks are karma, that the UK is reaping what it sowed, and other assorted quasi-religious proclamations that are gleefully typed out as fast as a keyboard can endure. The post has a tone of righteous outrage typical of Sri Lankans who actually know bugger-all about what they’re talking about. None of the people passing that post around find it ironic that we ourselves our harbouring a terrorist of far greater criminality than the so-called White Tigress could ever have hoped to be.

Karuna with Prabakharan (Asia Tribune)

Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, aka Colonel Karuna, was formerly the right-hand man of the Tiger leader Prabakharan. He was also was the Tiger commander for the Eastern Province, and in June 1990, he personally ordered the murder of over 600 (some say the number may be as high as 774) captured Sri Lankan policemen who President Premadasa had ordered to surrender when their police stations were being overrun. In 2004, Karuna defected from his former buddies, switched sides, and became a deputy party leader of the SLFP. Today he lives peacefully in Sri Lanka, comfortably supported by our tax rupees.

Shouldn’t we first try him for those 600 murders (that we know of) before hypocritically calling for the UK to deal with a middle-aged former nurse who was probably just caught up with the whole Daenerys Targaryenness of leading a rebel army? Even for a nation of hypocrites we never cease to look for ways of raising that bar.

Karuna gives an interview to Al Jazeera as a member of the SLFP and the government of Sri Lanka (Al Jazeera)